ColossiansOne

body · 2 claims

Failing Sight

Third of the thirty-six, countered by Uriel — and, in the gospels, the one affliction whose spiritual cause is explicitly denied.

Eye diseaseBlindness

The Testament assigns damage to the eyes to a decan and gives the archangel Uriel as the counter. Set against that, the gospel of John records the disciples asking whose sin caused a man's blindness and being told that the question is wrong — neither this man nor his parents.

The pairing is worth keeping in view across this whole section. The ancient world did not agree with itself that affliction implies a spirit, or that a spirit implies fault, and the texts that argue against the assumption are as old as the ones that make it.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

None — the attribution is refused

New Testament · c. 50–110 CE

Asked whose sin caused a man's blindness from birth, Jesus answers that neither the man nor his parents sinned.

John 9:1–3

Artosael

The Testament of Solomon · c. 100–400 CE

The third decan, who says he does damage to the eyes.

What stops it
The name of the archangel Uriel.

Testament of Solomon 18

Countermeasures

What the texts say stops it

c. 100–400 CE

The name of the archangel Uriel.

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions